Zambian students in Russia, Ukraine not given allowances

As stated in the reference above, we as ZASURU (students union in Russia and Ukraine) wish to express our grievances over the timeframe in which we receive our allowances. The bursaries committee has a tendency of giving us the funds after five to six month prior to the promised four months.

This has been an ongoing issue for many years now. Students find themselves in very desperate situations due to delayed payments. This leads to students not being able to meet their obligations in terms of visa renewals, settling hostel fees, buying medical policies on time which in some cases have led to court summons for visa related issues and evictions from hostels for delayed payments.

There is never any clear indication as to when allowances will be paid and even when the process starts it takes so long and not all students are paid their allowances at the time of remittance. The quarterly payment plan is no longer followed as agreed upon in our contracts on the contrary we receive in quarters and at times halves. This has really put students in very unpleasant situations.

We are writing this because we have exhausted all our means of trying to get to them and wish this will help. Two months has already passed from the time we were supposed to receive the funds .

Lastly, having said all that, we have written several letters in the past and we wrote another one two months ago to the Permanent Secretary but to date we have not received any response. We would like to take this moment through you to appeal to the President and Ministry of higher Education to consider paying us on time and increasing our allowances, because we can not manage to live on the current allowances as they are not enough. The last time students in Russia had an increment in the allowances was over 9years ago.